AUTHOR=Friedland Kevin D. , Methratta Elizabeth T. , Gill Andrew B. , Gaichas Sarah K. , Curtis Tobey H. , Adams Evan M. , Morano Janelle L. , Crear Daniel P. , McManus M. Conor , Brady Damian C. 

TITLE=Resource Occurrence and Productivity in Existing and Proposed Wind Energy Lease Areas on the Northeast US Shelf

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Marine Science

VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.629230

DOI=10.3389/fmars.2021.629230

ISSN=2296-7745

ABSTRACT=The states of the Northeast USA have the ambitious goal of producing in excess of 15 GW of offshore wind energy in the coming decades. The infrastructure associated with offshore wind energy development is expected to modify marine habitats and potentially alter the ecosystem services they provide. Species distribution models (using occurrence and productivity estimates) were constructed for a group fish and macroinvertebrate taxa resident in the Northeast US Continental Shelf marine ecosystem (NES). These models were analyzed to provide baseline context for impact assessment of lease areas in the Middle Atlantic Bight designated for renewable wind energy installations. Using random forest machine learning, occupancy and biomass models were constructed for 93 species providing seasonal depictions of their habitat distributions by year. We developed a scoring index to characterize lease area habitat use for each species. Subsequently, groups of species were identified that reflect varying levels of lease area habitat use ranging from high to no reliance on the lease area habitats. Among the high reliance species were black sea bass (Centropristis striata), summer flounder (Paralichthys dentatus), and Atlantic menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus), which are important fisheries species in the region. Potential for impact was characterized by the number of species with habitat dependencies associated with lease areas and these varied with a number of continuous gradients. Habitats that support high biomass were distributed more to the northeast, while high occurrence habitats appeared to be further from the coast. There was no obvious effect of size of the lease area on the importance of associated habitats. Model results indicated that physical drivers and lower trophic level indicators may strongly control the habitat distribution of ecologically and commercially important species in the wind lease areas. Therefore, physical and biological oceanography on the continental shelf proximate to wind energy infrastructure development should be monitored for changes in water column structure and the productivity of phytoplankton and zooplankton.